In a lounge beneath the Metropolitan Opera, the towering Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen is the picture of calm.
“My husband jokes I am like a pressure cooker,” she says with a laugh, sitting pin-straight on a sofa. (Standing, she’s an astonishing six-foot-two.) “I tend to save up emotions, positive or negative. But it can explode!”
Explosive is certainly one way to describe Davidsen’s voice, which has awed Met audiences since her 2019 debut there in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. The New York Times has since compared her soaring soprano to a rocket, and Angelina Jolie has called her Tosca “transcendent.” Now, Davidsen is preparing to open as the titular heroine in Tristan und Isolde, Wagner’s tale of doomed love between an Irish princess and a Cornish knight.
Davidsen, 39, is about as big a star as it is presently possible to be in opera—so much so that her first pregnancy last year made headlines. After her twin boys arrived in June, she took six months off to be with them and her husband, Ben, before returning to the stage in December (coincidentally, for a different production of Tristan, in Barcelona). “I wish it had been longer,” she laments of her maternity leave. “But then again, when is the right time to come back? It’s impossible to know.”
The Met Opera is a long way from Stokke, the Norwegian hamlet where she grew up playing handball and singing in church. She did not come from a musical family and only attended her first opera at 20. In university, at the Grieg Academy in Bergen, she studied voice, preferring Bach. (“I have not met anyone who doesn’t like Bach. Other composers you can argue back and forth but with Bach, you just can’t.”) It was in graduate school in Copenhagen that she finally turned her attention to opera, and since winning the prestigious Operalia competition a few years into her professional career, in 2015, she hasn’t looked back.
It’s clear that the Met, which has for years been in financial straits, sees Davidsen as one of its most bankable performers. Rather than open its 2026–27 season with a new, contemporary work, as has been the tradition the last few years, the house will instead mount a production of Verdi’s Macbeth, again starring Davidsen. So too is she slated to star in a new Met staging of Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle—the composer’s four-part masterpiece of Norse and Germanic legends, totaling 15 hours—over the course of three upcoming seasons.
“I do hope that the Met will find a way [to continue] because I love being here and I hope that with this opera, we’ve built something that people want to see again, that it can be repeated,” she says of Tristan. (Experimental director Yuval Sharon, who once staged Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in a parking garage, makes his Met debut with this Tristan; Es Devlin—known for her work with Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent, and Beyoncé—did the set design.)
For all the glamour of Davidsen’s position, it’s the Nordic emphasis on hard work that’s landed her where she is. “There are no shortcuts for me to sing something like this,” she notes. (Tristan und Isolde runs for nearly five hours.) “It is a marathon that you can’t start too hard, because then you’ll have nothing left. The aria in the end—I need all of my colors for it.”
To blow off steam between rehearsals and tending to her babies, Davidsen has been hitting the elliptical, though she’d much rather be jogging. “After I gave birth, my whole pelvic floor changed and at the moment I can’t run,” she says, frowning. She streams episodes of Bridgerton to make the workouts a little less dull: “You don’t have to focus—it just sort of goes in and goes out.”
For the younger audiences Davidsen and the Met Opera are trying to attract, a five-hour opera is a hard sell. “It’s impossible to convince someone whose attention span is only 20 seconds to say, ‘Let’s go and do five hours.’ That’s difficult,” Davidsen acknowledges. (Timothée Chalamet’s recent offhand comment that “no one cares about” ballet and opera anymore didn’t help matters, either.)
Still, she believes that her art form will persist. “It survived for hundreds of years already. I don’t know where it will be, but I do believe it will be,” she says, eyes flashing. “I will do whatever I can for it to stay.”
Tristan und Isolde runs at New York’s Metropoltian Opera from March 9 through April 4.